Proof Armor has increased.

No you're not; they do work that way. But how the game used to work I believe is that defense subtracted directly from damage, so 300 defense would mitigate 300 damage regardless of what toons did. After they changed defense to be percentage based, they kept the old defense numerical values but used some formula to turn that into a percentage that is actually used.

edit: please append "I think" in your head to all my statements cuz everything here's based on conjecture.